REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

   

HUE AND CRY. Ealing Studios, UK, 1947. Fine Arts Films, US, 1951. Alistair Sim, Harry Fowler, Valerie White, Jack Warner, Paul Demel, and a mess of kids. Written by T.E.B. Clark. Directed by Charles Crichton.

   Very uneven in tone, and all the better for it.

   After defeating the Axis, post-war England faced a very different problem. Thousands of children, left with single parents, and largely unsupervised, roamed the bombed-out city, doing what kids do: playing in the ruins, getting in trouble of all sorts, looking for fun or maybe just the Better World their parents fought and sometimes died for.

   This is the unlikely backdrop for T. E. B. Clark’s tale of mystery and adventure, and it’s a credit to all concerned that Hue and Cry neither shrinks from nor pontificates on the pervasive squalor. Rather, the filmmakers accept it as a fact of life — much as the children do — and go on about telling a ripping yarn.

   The plot hangs on the notion that kids of all ages, as the saying goes, are hooked on reading the adventures of Detective Selwyn Pike in a post-war penny-dreadful titled Trump (The mind reels with clever comments, all regretfully omitted.) until a lad in his late teens (Harry Fowler, awkward, charmless, and perfect for the part.) finds a correlation between incidents in the weekly episodes and a real-life crime wave. Someone is sending coded messages inside the stories!

   Duly inspired by Detective Pike’s example, Fowler and friends set out to catch the criminals, and it’s Buddies vs Baddies — with some surprisingly grim moments tossed in among the general merriment.

   Top-billed Alistair Sim shows up for about five minutes of screen time as the timorous author of the stories, a part that suits him so well I really wish writer Clark had given him something funny to say.

   But it’s the minors who carry this thing anyway, in scenes that lurch from kiddie stuff — like forcing a confession from a hard-boiled dame by scaring her with a mouse — to grim moments fleeing in a swampy sewer, then stalking and being stalked through a bombed-out tenement.

   It all culminates in an all-out attack by the kids on the crooks — later borrowed for The Good Humor Man (1950) —  as the children of the city descend upon the racketeers in a pitched and well-choreographed battle, intercut with moments of grim suspense as our boy-hero struggles with the master criminal in a tottering ruin that exemplifies the post-war disorder perfectly.

   But there’s a moment that will stay with me even longer than all this. Just a scene of children playing, and one of them, perched atop pile of rubble, gleefully, endlessly, aping the sound of bombs dropping.